Gone with the Wind

The film is based on Margaret Mitchell’s novel “Gone with the Wind”

It was with this book that my love of reading began 7 years ago.

The timing of the film is 3 hours 42 minutes, but this time flies by unnoticed.

In the center of the plot is Scarlett, eccentric, selfish, impudent, purposeful. We observe how a young girl becomes a strong woman, able to endure absolutely all life’s hardships.

The beautiful Vivien Leigh became the living embodiment of the book image, it is simply impossible to imagine Scarlett as another. Clark Gable in the image of Rhett Butler captivates the hearts of the audience with his charisma, charm, courage, honesty and the ability to love.

The film was stunningly shot for 39 years old, wonderful music creates the right mood, you can watch the costumes endlessly, the selection of actors is fully consistent with the original source, large-scale scenes are amazing.

There is a lot of humor that works and is understandable so far. There is a lot of drama breaking out tears, regret and empathy.

An ideal film adaptation, a vivid love story against the backdrop of war, which I want to revise over and over again.

Interesting facts: 5500 original costumes were made for the film, including 1200 uniforms of the Confederate army of the southerners. Their cost was only $ 10,000. All the uniforms went through the aging process: they were rubbed on the sand, used metal brushes, stained in the mud.

The film involves 59 actors and 2,400 extras, 1,100 horses, 375 other animals and 450 carriages and carts. The final cost of the film was $ 3.7 million (41 million in modern dollars), plus $ 550 thousand for advertising, posters and special booklets.

Leslie Howard, who played Ashley Wilkes, a war-torn hero of the Gone With the Wind, was a military reserve officer. When the Second World War began, he volunteered for the front and died: his plane was shot down.

For some not quite censored expressions of the characters of the film, Selznik was fined $ 5,000, but he always believed that he paid this money for good reason.

The color in the cinema was established much later (in the 1960s), but Gone With the Wind is a completely color film, it was shot using the Technicolor system, in which black-and-white pictures were painted in red and green and stitched into a single tape, which allowed to obtain the desired color scheme; this method was expensive, as it not only consumed a large amount of film, but also needed a specially redesigned movie camera.

Initially, in the scene, when Scarlett walks along the battlefield between the bodies of the killed and wounded southerners, it was planned to use 2,000 extras. But the Guild of Actors demanded to pay all of them at an average rate, which Selznik refused. The scene involved 800 paid extras and 400 volunteers who starred for free.

The first scene shot for the film was the scene of the escape of Scarlett and Rhett from flaming Atlanta, the scene was shot in natural conditions, the studio management set fire to a whole «block» of scenery left over from another film; at that time, the performer of the role of Scarlett was not yet approved and she was played by an actress, whose name remained unknown.

Vivien Leigh worked for 125 days and received $ 25,000, Clark Gable worked for 71 days and received $ 120,000. The film received 8 Oscars.